How angry do people have to be to start a riot? Is being too poor to shop reason enough?
Walmart has a problem these days, and it is resulting in plummeting revenues. People are too poor to shop there anymore. They have to live from paycheck to paycheck, or unemployment check to unemployment check, and tend to go to the dollar store rather than blow big money at the mega store. Target’s earnings are up because they focus on the affluent, meaning $60,000 to $80,000 wage earners. They also have continued to add food items to their stores, competing on price with regular super markets. Dollar stores are even undercutting Walmart when it comes to food items.
There have been huge riots in England, disturbances in Italy and France, and most recently arsonists have started blowing up cars in Germany. So far, flash mob riots in the United States have been limited to outbreaks in Philadelphia and Cleveland.
The question is this: If in the heart of America people can’t even afford Walmart anymore, are we headed for the anger that boils over into violence as it’s begun to happen around the world? Egypt and the United States might look different in many respects, including the form of government, but the inequity of wealth is the same. So, too, is total absence of social mobility caused by the lack of a quality public education system to level the playing field.
If the average blue-collar worker in America is permanently unemployed, damn worried about slipping into that category, doesn’t have a college education and has no realistic way to get one, and is struggling mightily to feed their family at the dollar store, it seems plausible that the Tea Party is a mild reaction to an unfair and humiliating situation.
Let’s all try to find constructive ways to work toward greater equality and opportunity. Men, the hardest hit by the recession, need particular, specific help getting back into the workforce. And in the meantime, the one thing that is sure to fuel greater resentment is the utter lack of acknowledgment by those in Boston, Wall Street. and Silicon Valley of just how bad the situation is for a giant swath of our citizens.
—Photo by KevinDooley on Flickr
About Tom Matlack
It will happen. People get hungry enough and they will take to the streets. America is a lot different in that our citizens have not experienced real hunger here in decades. It is also different in that we have a different class of ruling wealthy. They’ve never had to personally drive men like the robber barons of years gone by. They have no skill in controlling groups of people with fists and brutality. The situation is tenuous.
Which one was caused by “being too poor to shop?”
The riots in England were started as a protest against police shooting to death a 29 year old black man. Among the rioters were many upper and middle class youths.
The last “disturbances” in Italy, as far as I can tell, were last year when migrant workers were pissed off because Italian youths were shooting at them.
The last riots in France were in 2005, when immigrant youths were protesting their lack of political power. However, there are often smaller “disturbances” in France when the unions strike, so maybe that is what you are thinking of. There were major protests a year ago when Sarkozi began raising the retirement age…which is not about shopping, either.
The car bombings in Germany have been going on for several years and are not really, as far as anyone can tell, connected to joblessness or the like. They are considered to be more political statements against globalization and capitalism.
I don’t think Americans are going to riot because they go to Dollar General rather than Walmart. Just like they didn’t riot when they shifted from Sears to Walmart.
It is true that inequality of wealth (not sure about inequity, which hints at fairness of distribution) is badly skewed in the United States. But there is absolutely no indication that Americans are bothered by this. There is still a large majority who favor cutting taxes on the wealthy, including capital gains and inheritance taxes.
I don’t know of any country that offers greater social mobility than the United States. It is true that most people are going to live their entire lives within the single working class into which they are born…but where is that not true? America still, as far as I’m aware, provides the world with more billionaires and millionaires that did not start with wealth than any other single country in the world. At least that’s what my reading of the Forbes 500 shows.
Beyond that, the poor in Egypt actually starve. While we discuss “food insecurity” it is not the same thing as actual starvation. Between food stamps and school lunches and Social Security/Disability payments, America is actually doing fairly well on this issue (though each of those programs are now targeted by conservatives for cuts).
Other than “doesn’t have a college education,” I don’t see how this is different for white collar folks. I have an MA and teach at a Community College, making $35,000 a year. My brother is a pipe-fitter and makes close to $100,000 a year, with no college. He shops at the Dollar Store because he sees no reason to pay more for the same product. I shop there because I have no choice. Oh, and I have to make student loan payments every month that he doesn’t.
By the way, I have no tenure, nor even a permanent position. For that to happen, I’m pretty much waiting for someone to retire or die on the job. There is a very limited pool of jobs open for me, most of them are part-time and temporary with no benefits. He will never have a permanent position, but the job pool is fairly large as long as he’s willing to travel a bit (even if I’m willing to travel, I’m fairly limited). His jobs are also temporary, but they are full-time and he carries benefits through his union.
The Tea Party is in no way a reaction to not being able to shop at Walmart. Nor are they simply a blue collar movement. A Gallup poll found that 31% of Tea Party people have college degrees, including 15% with postgraduate degrees. That compares to 33% of non-TP folks with college degrees and 16% with advanced degrees. TP’s were less likely to make less than $30,000 and more likely to make over $55,000 than non-TPs. 49% of them were employed full-time, compared to 47% of others.
The Tea Party is largely a reaction against the HEALTH CARE bill that was signed into law. The Tea Party actually backs, in large numbers, conservative Republicans who push policies that hurt the very inequalities identified in the article. So…why would they riot when they get what they want?
I really don’t get the reference to Boston. I can honestly say that most people in Texas don’t care at all what people in Boston think. When they do, it’s to say that their “loony liberal” ideas of income inequality, equal rights, and unionization are what’s destroying our country.
Inequality and poverty are not the same thing. Inequality is not really an economic problem, it’s a political problem. At least, it becomes a political problem if there are expectations that are not being met, or if there is a perceived unfairness about inequality. There is no magic tipping point at which society rebels against economic inequality by staging a class war. Some societies tolerate extreme gaps between rich and poor and hardly think anything of it, while others are sensitive about the slightest gap.
The recent revolutions in the Middle East are not generally powered by those with nothing to lose. A lot of the people taking to the squares have been intellectuals, college-educated citizens, middle class people, even some of the pre-existing elite. The people who are desperately starving are not usually the ones seeking to overthrow an entire system. They’re too busy trying to get something to eat.
If American history is any indication, if America’s poor and working class rise up to fight poverty and inequality, they won’t attack the rich. They’ll attack other poor people. A lot of those too poor to shop at Walmart are no doubt blaming illegal immigrants, the welfare system, the evil Federal government, the Illuminati, black helicopters, you name it. The 1992 L.A. riots didn’t spill out into the wealthy neighborhoods. Rioters generally targeted people and businesses not much better off than they were.
Mr. Black (through no fault of his own, I’m sure, since I generally agree with his Tea-Bagger-Tantrum-Party assessments) neglected to mention their rabid hatred of Obama in general. It’s almost as if the Tea Party movement in its infancy was angriest at mainstream Republicans & the former administration for screwing up so badly they felt that the country got “stuck” with a black president & felt there was no choice but to mount an assault from the far-away enchanted land of Wing-Nuttery.
One of the more usual causes of revolutions happen not because of the discontent of the lower orders. They have little means to effect change. Revolutions take off when the existing order ALSO hurts the interests of the minor ‘aristocracy’ and the upper middle class – the immediate servants of the elite with the people under their direct command, the people who actually do the daytoday running of the various functions of society. This existing order is starting to hurt the upper middle class in the west Conditions are ripening for an overthrow.
Youth unemployment here in the uk for 16to24yo is not 25% as the government claims, theyve been massaging the figures. it is closer to 40% generally. (It should be noted the students rioted a year ago, and this unemployment and low opportunity environment for educated and uneducated was a factor in our recent english riots). Which is the unemployment rate in the young of the middle east. It was this discontent, the unemployment or underemployment of the educated young of the upper middle class, that fueled the Arab uprising in the spring, and gave direction to the wider discontent that the lower order
The prime conditions for that uprising exist in the west too. Increasing unemployment or underemployment by the educated young. And the declining living standards and opportunities for the upper middle class.
Let it tinder
kindle baby kindle
I’ve been throwing this out there for all of these great conversations about class and inequality, so I’ll do it here too. Check out a “resource based economy” on http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com and http://www.thevenusproject.com. It advocates a different kind of approach to a social system based on solving our problems with the scientific method and technology.